The Green Revolution crops, introduced in the late 1960s and early 1970s, produce several times as much grain as the traditional varieties they replaced, and they spread rapidly. They enabled India to double its wheat crop in seven years, dramatically increasing food supplies and averting widely predicted famine. The Green Revolution's leading research achievement was to hasten the perfection of dwarf spring wheat. Though it is conventionally assumed that farmers want a tall, impressive-looking harvest, in fact shrinking wheat and other crops has often proved beneficial. Bred for short stalks, plants expend less energy on growing inedible column sections and more on growing valuable grain. Stout, short-stalked wheat also neatly supports its kernels, whereas tall-stalked wheat may bend over at maturity, complicating reaping. Nature has favored genes for tall stalks, because in nature plants must compete for access to sunlight. In high-yield agriculture equally short-stalked plants will receive equal sunlight. Researchers are seeking dwarf strains of rice and other crops in order to increase agronomic yields. Identification of genes and metabolic pathway modifications that can be used for creation of rapidly growing dwarf strains would be especially useful for grain and cereal crops and also for other agronomically important crops such as forest trees, ornamental species such as turfgrass, and plants such as Nicotiana sp. grown as hosts for biopharmaceutical manufacturing.
The discovery of putative known and unknown DNA and amino acid sequences identified in one or more metabolic pathways leading to dwarfism and stunting in plants satisfies a need in the art by providing new compositions which are useful in agriculture to create dwarf varieties of any plant species.